The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  After a full day of flying and driving, Luke still hadn’t made sense of what had happened since the night Lanny walked into his ER. Then again, he’d actively tried to block her out of his mind while traveling, for fear of having a meltdown alone and in public. He’d shut off his cell phone and stuffed it into his suitcase to avoid the temptation of checking for missed calls that never came.

  “More coffee?” Tricia asked, rousing him out of his reverie.

  “What? No, thanks.” He’d always been a heavy coffee drinker, needing it to get him through his shifts at the hospital, but he didn’t think it would help today to be wired on caffeine.

  “You going to be okay?” she asked.

  “Me? Yeah. Sure. It was a shock, her leaving like that.”

  “She didn’t give any hint? No indication that this was coming?” There was an edge to Tricia’s questions. She hadn’t liked Lanny to begin with, and now there’d be no way to redeem her in Tricia’s eyes. Talking with his ex-wife was going to be trickier than Luke thought: he couldn’t tell Tricia the truth about Lanny, and without knowing what made her unique, there was no way Tricia would understand why he was so depressed by her departure.

  “No. It was out of the blue,” he answered.

  “She was too young for you, Luke. Too immature,” Tricia said, briskly but not unkindly. “What were you going to get out of it in the long run? It’s for the best that it didn’t drag on too long. It’ll be that much easier to put behind you.” She moved the cake stand to the credenza in the dining room and then stepped behind him to rub his back. “I’m sorry that you got hurt, Luke, really I am. But she wasn’t right for you.”

  “You didn’t know her, Tricia. I didn’t go away with her because I’m having a midlife crisis. It wasn’t about sex. I want you to know that.”

  “Okay, I believe you. But what kind of future was there for you with her? She didn’t sound stable, getting into all that trouble. . . .”

  She didn’t come out and say, What were you thinking? But after seven years of marriage, he could read her mind. And after being peppered with questions from Tricia over the past three months, he knew what she thought about Lanny. Tricia believed Lanny had tempted him with her glamorous life abroad, lured him there with promises of never having to worry about money again, making Luke abandon his steady job at the hospital. Luke could tell that Tricia was holding back, and he appreciated her restraint. He knew she wanted to shake him and ask: How could you leave your daughters behind? How could you choose that woman over your own kids? Maybe pleading temporary insanity would be his best defense.

  “No, I guess she wasn’t all that stable,” he agreed, to make Tricia think he hadn’t entirely lost his mind.

  Tricia stood beside him and stared out the back door, too. “Not that I’m rushing you, but . . . have you thought about what you’re going to do next?” Luke shook his head. “Joe Duchesne still calls here looking for you,” she continued, keeping her voice even. “I told him I didn’t know where you were, of course, but he wanted me to tell you, the next time we spoke, that you have to turn yourself in. He just wants to ask you some questions.”

  Luke snorted softly. “I don’t see any reason to go back to St. Andrew. I’m certain the hospital has suspended my privileges. They’d have to, under the circumstances. There’s nothing for me there now.”

  “That can be fixed, once you talk to them and explain what happened. Everyone will understand.” That seemed unlikely, but Tricia pressed on. “The hospital, your practice, the farm—that’s your life, even if you don’t stay in St. Andrew. You have to deal with the police and the questions, even though it’s not going to be pleasant. It’s not like you can just walk away from that and start over as a different person, Luke.”

  If Lanny had stayed with me, I could have, Luke thought. I could leave this shattered life behind. But for the girls . . . He needed to be a father to his girls.

  “I’m sorry. . . . It’s too soon for me to be bringing this up.” Tricia patted his shoulder and stepped over to the sink, running water over the mixing bowl and measuring cups. “You stay here for as long as you need to. Spend time with the girls. Before you know it, everything will fall into place. You’ll know what you need to do, and the past few months will seem like a distant memory. It’ll seem like something that happened to someone else, not to you. You’ll forget all about her.”

  Tricia’s presence dissolved into the background as she washed dishes, lost in the ordinary sounds of domesticity, the clink of glass and metal and sloshing water. Luke knew that he would never forget Lanny. She may have tossed him out of her life and he was hurt, but he couldn’t harden his heart to her. He worried about her, and wondered if there was a reason he hadn’t heard from her. He realized he would never stop worrying about her; he would always wonder where she was and what she was doing, if she was happy, if she was safe. She would haunt him the rest of his life.

  THIRTEEN

  BOSTON

  Patience. Adair was tired of Jude telling him to be patient, tired of his never-ending stream of excuses for not learning Lanore’s whereabouts and of his irritating habit of telling Adair to relax. How could he possibly relax until he found the woman who’d taken two hundred years from him? The only person—man or woman—who’d gotten the better of him? Too, he was frustrated by his helplessness in navigating this strange, fast-paced world in which he suddenly found himself. And this lack of control put him ill at ease.

  Adair had been born impatient; he knew this from his earliest days, when he had thrown toys at servants and kicked the household hounds to get them out of his way. It wasn’t until he was in his teenage years that he learned from his father, a duke and liege of a small kingdom, the value of hiding one’s feelings. It was a rare ruler who wasn’t spied on, constantly under the gaze of his courtiers, servants, and tenant farmers. Through his father, Adair learned that the most effective rulers were those with the most self-control, and through observation he came to understand the value of keeping his temper in check.

  In the brief time Adair had been free, he noticed that the pace of living in this new age made it harder to be patient. He figured it had to do with the immediacy that technology enabled. Life had been easier in the old days, when information traveled slowly: news came by courier on horseback or wrapped in gossip passed along by merchants or by pilgrims taking a night’s refuge under a kind stranger’s roof. The hardest adjustment to modern times was not being able to think before he needed to act; new information came at him endlessly, making each decision tantamount to gambling. These intangibles—news, feelings, lies, opinion—were typed up on keyboards by millions of hands and rocketed around at such numbers that he could literally feel their urgency thrum in the air. Energy pushed and pulled violently around him, prickling at his skin, needling him. There is more than you could ever hope to know hidden in the ether, it seemed to be telling him.

  Adair rubbed his eyes in exhaustion and frustration. He was restless: living in Jude’s glass house was like being kept in a box, only slightly better than being trapped behind the wall. He needed to be on the move to feel as though he was making progress or the rage that ticked under his skin would find a way to erupt.

  He burst out of the house without telling anyone, joining the trickle of people on the sidewalk. His thoughts turned inward as he walked, not looking into the faces of the people who passed him for fear he would misinterpret the slightest gesture—a raised eyebrow, a grin on an idiot’s face—and strike out in anger, unable to check his misdirected rage in time.

  He started on the trail he’d taken the day he was freed from his prison, eventually walking the many blocks through the city to the place where his mansion had once stood. The site was roped off with white-and-red tape and sawhorses, with signs declaring it a construction site. The mansion was gone, and in its place was a bare lot, every stick and stone cleared away. A large metal excavator stood idle beside the beginnings of a pit that loomed like an open grave. Adair stoo
d behind the fluttering tape with his hands thrust in his pockets, the wind carrying his stray curls before his eyes as though to spare him the sight of his former prison. But it was a prison no more. Funny to think that this once damnable place, the scene of his persecution, was now . . . nothing. There was nothing at which to hurl his anger: no house, no cleft in the earth, not even a sufficiently deep hole into which he could pour his rage. It had been stripped of all significance.

  Just then he noticed from the corner of his eye a woman at the other end of the lot, also staring at the site where the house once stood. He couldn’t see her very well at that distance, but he sensed something familiar about her. She wore a green wool coat with a hood that obscured her face as completely as a monk’s cowl, but she appeared to be slender, and blond corkscrew curls poked like wild ferns from around the edge of her hood.

  From a distance she looked like Lanore, though he knew that was impossible: he would have felt her presence, or so he assumed. There might be a chance she had found a way to dampen her presence, to blind him to her. She had succeeded in putting up that damnable wall and hiding his presence from his followers for centuries, hadn’t she? She could be the woman in green—or it could be that he was just desperate to see her again.

  And if it was Lanore . . . Adair could just imagine the sinking feeling in her chest as she looked on the desolate lot and realized he’d been released like a malevolent djinn from his lamp and that no protection stood between them anymore—none at all. Her throat would tighten and she would have difficulty swallowing as the seriousness of her situation became fully apparent. And then, as though the woman in green had read Adair’s thoughts, she turned and hurried away, her footfalls clattering noisily up the empty street as though she were trying to outpace the judgment that awaited her.

  He kept a good distance between them as he followed. The streets were deserted at this hour on a Sunday: children were indoors for early dinners, lights had been snapped on, and blinds were drawn against the dusk. The woman turned down a street Adair remembered from the day he was freed because the houses were all marked for demolition. In the middle of the block stood the warehouse he’d ducked into that day. Thinking ahead, he saw that if she continued straight, she’d come out in a populated area where the houses were occupied and the streets were busy with traffic; but if she turned left, she’d go right by the empty warehouse. He would leave it in fate’s hands. Fate would decide whether to deliver Lanore to him that day.

  Adair cut through the building at a jog and with a little searching found a door that opened onto the deserted side street. He crouched behind a row of corroded metal barrels, wondering how long he should wait to see if she would pass by, when he heard footsteps on the gritty pavement. Adair waited until the woman had just passed the stand of barrels—the flash of the green overcoat unmistakable—before he stepped out and seized her, carefully clapping one hand over her mouth.

  He pushed her ahead of him into the building. His gaze went instinctively to a dark corner under a flight of metal stairs on the other side of the warehouse. At first she didn’t react, as though in shock, but halfway across the open floor she started to struggle in his arms, to dig in her heels. She was a fraction of his weight, however, and her resistance amounted to nothing against his fury.

  Of course, he knew this woman was not Lanore. He knew by her scent, the way she breathed, the way she moved. She was young and pretty in a way not unlike Lanore, but the resemblance ended there. No matter. This woman would have to do: there was no stopping the hatred rising inside him. Adair’s anger over his betrayal and his broken heart came thundering down like a landslide. He threw his victim on her back as she cried out in terror and stammered unintelligibly, the sound of her voice blanked out by his rage.

  There were words he wanted to say to her—Treacherous whore, betrayer—but they wouldn’t come out of his throat, caught as though snagged on thorns. Heartless witch. You left me in darkness. Two hundred years of solitude, terrified that it was never going to end. I loved you as I loved no one else, I trusted you, and you buried me alive to be with him.

  He struck the figure beneath him with his fists until the hands held up to protect her face fell away and the face itself was a bloody open wound. By then he’d torn the green coat open, reached down to free himself, and pushed into her, his bloodied hands pinning her limp form to the floor to withstand his thrusts.

  He collapsed onto her when he came, climaxing so fiercely that he saw stars of white flare before his eyes. He was still enraged but embarrassed that he had been unable to keep himself from destroying this woman. She was not dead yet but certainly beyond saving, and so with the last of his anger he reached for a loose brick nearby. The feel of the brick, its dusty bloom and mildewed smell, brought the chalky taste of his basement prison to his mouth and angered him enough to bring the brick down against her skull twice, three times, until the bone cracked like a walnut shell and she went completely still.

  Adair sat back on his heels, breathing hard. As he looked down on the woman, her identity now obliterated, his stomach lurched. The remains alone could fool him into believing he was looking down on Lanore: his Lanore could be lying inert before him, destroyed by his hand.

  In that awful moment, he realized that he didn’t want this to happen. He did not want Lanore to die and was frightened to realize he was capable of killing her, that he could be completely engulfed with rage, swept away, to emerge on the other side with blood on his hands. The thought that he could lose her forever clawed at his heart, creating a darkness into which he could pour himself and never, ever touch bottom.

  How could he have done such a thing to an innocent woman? There was no better proof that he truly was a monster. Even to himself he seemed a figure created out of pure hate, a vortex of fury that rose from some hellish unknown place. He disliked being out of control: it smacked of weakness and failure, two things he looked down on in others and wouldn’t tolerate in himself.

  Adair stood and examined his clothing for bloodstains and luckily found only small ones, unnoticeable under casual inspection. His bloody hands could be hidden in his pockets. He glanced back at the body one last time; it wasn’t in the open but lay behind a stack of pallets, only her feet visible. She wouldn’t be found immediately. He staggered outside and began the walk back to Jude’s house, the cold air welcome on his overheated face. It would take the murderous flush from his cheeks and wash away the smell of death that clung to him.

  Adair’s stomach twisted as he hurried along, his thoughts a mess, upended in fifteen violent minutes. Lanore was his weakness, his Achilles’ heel. He understood that he would need to find a way to control his emotions, and after all that he’d been through, that would not be easy. It seemed his nature was one of violence and rage, and he wondered if he could change. He would have to be disciplined; he now understood that he wouldn’t be able to bear it if he killed her.

  Adair loved Lanore, he hated her, but he was unable to take revenge against her and more compelled to find her than ever. His love for her was sublime, and it was also a bitter curse, running through his veins like an infection. He needed no more proof to see that he was damned, irredeemable and damned, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  FOURTEEN

  MAINE

  Adair had a vivid picture in his mind of Lanore’s hometown: she’d described it to him as an isolated village separated from the rest of the world by a vast, untamable forest and a wide river. At the time it was 1816 and America was young, with only a handful of settlers spread over as much land as the rest of the known world—or so it seemed—and Adair dismissed her account as that of a girl who’d seen little and knew nothing.

  But after traveling to St. Andrew, Adair had to admit that it was difficult to get to, even by modern standards. He had his first taste of the airship that Jude had told him about, only this one was a tiny commuter plane that rattled and shimmied throughout the flight, seemingly ready to break apart at any moment
. The rest of the trip from Presque Isle to St. Andrew had to be made by automobile, following a long, lonely route that took him through endless farms and empty fields. He passed through forests that so reminded him of Saxony and Bavaria, he half expected a band of brigands to come bursting out of the wood on horseback.

  Adair was actually looking forward to seeing the town of St. Andrew. He wanted to go to the place where Lanny had grown up and see the town that had shaped the woman he had loved. She brought out a youthful, almost lovesick curiosity in him, and though Adair would never admit it, he was eager to know every tiny detail about her, and that included visiting the places from her stories, if they still existed—if they had not been razed and rebuilt entirely differently, like the cities from his past.

  As Adair got closer to town, he began to sense that he probably wouldn’t find many answers on this trip. The sensation in his head was weak, so it was unlikely that Lanore was nearby. Still, the keening had been inactive for so long that he felt he could no longer interpret what it tried to tell him, and he was buoyed by the slim chance that Jonathan could be here. It could be a sign from the forces of the universe that he’d suffered enough, that they would deliver one of his tormentors to him, and he wanted to believe that the cosmos was on his side.

  Jude had not been as optimistic about what he might find. “From what Maurice gave you and what you found out from that aid agency, it’s a safe bet that Jonathan went to Maine with Lanny,” the Dutchman had reasoned. “But there’s nothing to indicate that they’re still there. Let’s have Maurice look for new financial activity on this man Schneider before you go up there.”

  Adair waited while Maurice checked Schneider’s credit card activity and bank accounts, only to find that they had gone abruptly dormant a few months prior. And St. Andrew proved as logical a starting point as any other, given the hacker’s trail of data. The thought that Lanore might be close was irresistible.